Even a few years ago the word “blog” inspired that peculiar mix of derision and dismissal that seems to haunt new media innovations long after they’re proven. A blogger was a lonely, pajama-clad person in a dark room, typing out banal musings he mistook for interesting ones, to be read by a handful of friends or strangers if they were read at all.

That blogs have now become a fixture of media and culture might, you’d think, give critics pause before indulging in another round of new media ridicule. But it ain’t so.

Twitter, the micromessaging service where users broadcast short thoughts to one another, has been widely labeled the newest form of digital narcissism. And if it’s not self-obsession tweeters are accused of, it’s self-promotion, solipsism or flat out frivolousness.

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Like is the new favorite, which was, at one time, the new bookmark. This small, but important feature will reinforce relationships between friends and followers and those who produce, interact with, and share content.

Made popular by services such as FriendFeed, and now Facebook, the idea of liking an update is much bigger than merely bookmarking or favoriting (yes, it’s a new verb in the social Web) updates from friends and contacts for later reference. The act of liking is quickly emerging as a simple, but complimentary gesture of acknowledgment and reciprocation to recognize the contribution of someone whom you follow.

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That Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other tidbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?

But perhaps additional friends are not free. Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming.” In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerization certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom–and why–demands quite a bit of mental computation.

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Facebook has a chief privacy officer, but I doubt that the position will exist 10 years from now. That’s not because Facebook is hell-bent on stripping away privacy protections, but because the popularity of Facebook and other social-networking sites has promoted the sharing of all things personal, dissolving the line that separates the private from the public.

As the scope of sharing personal information expands from a few friends to many sundry individuals grouped together under the Facebook label of “friends,” disclosure becomes the norm and privacy becomes a quaint anachronism.

Facebook’s younger members–high school or college students, and recent graduates who came of age as Facebook got its start on campuses–appear comfortable with sharing just about anything. It’s the older members–those who could join only after it opened membership in 2006 to workplace networks, then to anyone–who are adjusting to a new value system that prizes self-expression over reticence.

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In the heyday of rock music, no stadium gig was complete without a slow number that prompted the crowd to hold aloft their cigarette lighters to create hundreds of flickering points of light. Now the same effect is created by hundreds of people holding up their mobile phones as the audience takes photo after photo to prove they were there.

This is most likely to occur in the U.K. as the British use their mobile phone as a camera more than anyone else. They are also among the world’s fastest adopters of social-networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo, posting the subsequent photos or at least updating their status to relate how great the gig was, as a way of keeping in touch with an ever-expanding and ephemeral collection of “friends.”

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